Ad of the Year

June 26th, 2008

Our low fares really are low

What sort of topsy-turvy world are we living in when Southwest is the service leader?
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Mexican Cactus Fly

June 20th, 2008

Huge black fly gathering pollen
Mexican Cactus Fly, Copestylum mexicana
Tustin Market, Tustin, CA, 2008-05-31

This is the single largest fly I have ever seen. Until I looked closer, I thought it was a carpenter bee, and a large one at that.

Firefox 3 for the Mac

June 19th, 2008

I tried Firefox 3 on Windows and I liked it there, but on the Mac? Bleah. It looks like a bad knockoff of Safari but without the attention to detail that signifies Apple products. A lot of the icons are ugly, and off by just a pixel here or there. You’d think one pixel wouldn’t make that much difference but it does. Plus I actually preferred the traditional Firefox 2 chrome to the Safari style brushed metal widgets.

Plus it’s perceptually much slower than Firefox 2. I’m a 20 WPM typist at best and I’m typing faster than Firefox can enter text into this form. The characters are several words behind where I’m typing about half the time.
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Long-bodied Cellar Spider

June 19th, 2008

Long-legged spider with prey
Long-bodied Cellar Spider, Pholcus phalangioides
Irvine, CA, 2008-06-10

This one appears to be eating some other spider.

Apple gets Pwned

June 18th, 2008
$ osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "whoami"'
root

Wow. A one line script that allows any logged in user to grab root, not even a buffer overflow or third party software involved. This is movie plot hacking at its finest. I haven’t seen an attack this bad in years.

The only thing I would imagine that could be worse would be if you could execute this attack remotely.

Age of Slonan

June 18th, 2008

Anyone else notice that Age of Conan got covered in tar by the latest patch on Monday? My new PC (2 GB RAM, dual core, NVidia 8800GT) went from a respectable 40+ frames per second at maximum settings to a nearly unplayable 10 FPS or less, even on much reduced settings.

If this isn’t fixed soon, it may break my MMO habit once and for all. (Then again, I have been wondering about City of Heroes…)

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